He puts Cotten in closeup, on a side of the screen, while his pursuer is clearly seen in the deep background; or there's a palm frond in the foreground, action in the middle ground, the river shimmering far away.
In one, Coy gets beaten up in the deep background, but the camera blurs the violence, focussing instead on two unmoving observers who stand in the foreground.
Intimate conversations take place as a turbulent skirmish rages in the deep background center-screen, between the talkers' faces in the foreground.
The number of fire-flies in their clustering millions may really rival, for aught I can tell, the number of stars in the Milky Way, or that of the minute stellar points in the deep background of the firmament.
In the deep background, scarcely mentioned, Islamic culture is challenged by Western values and personal choice battles fate.
I sat at a table in the deep background of a shot with an irritating Canadian girl, unable to summon the energy to get away from her strident opinions on everything.
In one brilliantly staged sequence Stevens places Milland and Wright in the foreground, as they slip into an air-clearing conversation that may end their marriage; in the deep background are the couple's two rambunctious boys, struggling with a stepladder that threatens to collapse on a table stacked with Christmas dinnerware.
"There's photos from our high school musicals, and I'm comically in the deep background, wearing a beggar's costume" she told Montagne.
Given that Colin Angle, founder of iRobot, has a MS in Computer Science and a deep background in artificial intelligence and robotics, it's clear that this is a battle of the megaminds.
Certainly, though, he'll bring one asset the original series didn't exactly have in spades: Copeland has a deep background in comedy.
